Meet Tommy Marshall, lead hauler among ESPN College Gameday tour team truckers

Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole directs traffic in this week's edition of Overdrive Radio with Game Creek Video entertainment-biz hauler Tommy Marshall. And directs traffic in more ways than one, as it were. He joined Marshall out along University Boulevard at the Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa a couple weeks ago for the unload process of Marshall and his team of operators hauling the mobile-television production of ESPN's College Gameday broadcast. The college-football show airs every Saturday throughout the Fall ahead of the day’s football games, live from a different university site each week.

Subscribe to the podcast on your listening platform of choice for early access to the weekly In the podcast, we drop into some of Cole’s detailed reporting from the site, with Marshall in the production studio truck for the Game Creek Video company among several operators from a other businesses dedicated to the production. That includes West River Light and Sound, and longtime trucker Gerry Glass. It’s Glass’s initial contact that led to the opportunity Cole got to spend with Tommy Marshall and the rest of the crew in Tuscaloosa. I got a call from Glass on Labor Day, as the crew was prepping to head to Tuscaloosa to stage on the campus for Alabama v. Texas the following Saturday.

Would we be interested in seeing what they do firsthand? Gerry Glass asked. Overdrive is headquartered in Tuscaloosa, of course, but I live in Nashville, Tennessee. However; Cole was the perfect man for the job, a U. of A. Crimson Tide grad and fan, no less.

No football bias in the reporting in this case, though, given the detailed look Cole delivered focuses squarely on what Marshall and crew do in this unique operation, where actual truck driving might be the least time-consuming part of the whole affair. At once, a lot depends on just where producers decide to go week to week. Marshall and crew typically learn their next weekly destination on any given Sunday after Saturday's slate of games.

Most weeks, their next destination is drivable as a typical solo driver operation. This week, for example, Marshall and crew were in South Bend, Indiana, for the Ohio State v. Notre Dame matchup on Sept. 23 and will drive the approximately 715 miles to Durham, North Carolina, to Duke University for the Duke v. Notre Dame game on Sept. 30.